Bill Maher Blames Movies For Mass Shootings: ‘Woke’ Hollywood Pushes Idea That ‘Guns are the Best Solution to Life’s Problems’
Bill Maher targeted “woke” Hollywood on Friday, insisting gun violence in slick movie and TV productions plays a role in inspiring mass shooters.
Many Hollywood celebrities are calling for gun reform legislation in the wake of the Uvalde shooting, including actor Matthew McConaughey, a Uvalde native who visited the White House recently and suggested multiple laws that could be passed to help curb gun violence.
Maher isn’t buying into it, closing out Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday by showing a mass of clips from Hollywood productions like The Punisher and Django Unchained to show how gun violence is celebrated in front of the screen, while being condemned behind the camera.
The clips included a screaming Frank Castle/The Punisher firing two rifles and Django from Django Unchained creating an impressive amount of explosive blood with two revolvers to the tune of Tupac and James Brown.
It’s funny, Hollywood is the wokest place on Earth in every other area of social responsibility. They have intimacy coordinators on set to chaperone sex scenes, they hire sensitivity readers to go through and edit scripts, Disney stood up to the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law, another studio spent $10 million to digitally remove Kevin Spacey from a movie, but when it comes to the unbridled romanticization of gun violence, crickets. Weird. The only thing we don’t call a trigger is the one that actually has a trigger
Maher ripped into liberals who push for gun reform, but do not acknowledge the role onscreen violence can play in influencing the mentally unstable.
“When liberals scream, ‘Do something!’ after a mass shooting, why aren’t we also dealing with the fact that the average American kid sees 200,000 acts of violence on screens before the age of 18 and that according to the FBI, one of the warning signs of a potential school shooter is ‘a fascination with violence-filled entertainment,'” the comedian said.
Hollywood has pushed the idea that “guns are the best solution to life’s problems,” Maher argued, drawing a “sick similarity” between Hollywood “revenge fantasies” about loners with guns and school shooters.
And it’s not just the idea presented over and over and over again that guns are the best solution to life’s problems. It’s why the hero is using a gun. They call them action movies. They should call them revenge movies. Because that’s the plot of every one of them. And there’s a sick similarity in the revenge fantasies Hollywood turns out and those of school shooters.
While arguments about violent movies and media are typically made by conservatives when discussing mass shootings, Maher swiped away any such potential criticism of his points. He displayed a pie chart as well pointing to mental health, easy access to guns, and smartphones as motivators behind gun violence.
“The usual suspects on the far-left will say that I’m delivering some sort of conservative rant here or that I’m undermining gun control,” he said. “No. It’s neither. It’s just what’s real.”
Watch above via HBO.
